Scratch

     Though he hates all of creation, even he’s not immune to the stark grandeur of the badlands at night.  He admires the starlit beauty of the deeply eroded landscape as he goes about his work, slipping through empty moments of time with his shovel and his bag.  He has dug thirteen pits already tonight, and has time for a few more.  He can’t be seen by anyone, that’s part of the deal, and so night is the best time for work.   

     

     The arroyo looks good.  Overland flow has sliced through soft silty mudrock, exposing a well-indurated sandstone ledge at the base.  That’ll do nicely for the Tyrannosaur, he says to no one in particular.  He bends down, no mean feat with his oddly bent legs (though, he admits, the hooves come in handy, all that scrambling over hill and slope), and licks his serpent tongue over the rock.  Quartz cemented, thank Baal, he didn’t really want to have to deal with the iron cements, not now, not after the last few pits and with dawn so close, iron that hates magic with every vibration of its electron shell. 

     

      He burns the binding mineral away with a wave of his hand, transferring the energy a few thousand miles up where a thermal anomaly will go unnoticed.  Then, carefully and one by one, he removes the rounded grains of feldspar, quartz, and chert, the flakes of mica, and the microscopic spikes of sanidine that constitute the sandstone.  He lets them drift in limbo while he looks over the schematics.

     

     Dagon save us, there are so many parts!  It’s all nonsense, he thinks to himself, and just the sort of waste he’ll do away with once he gets in charge.  He lines the pieces up for the (mercifully incomplete) find: teeth, premaxilla, maxilla, opercular, dentary, jugal, quadratojugal, quadrate, ye gods they’re complicated beasts, squamosal, post orbital, nasal, occipital, and the vertebral column. 

     

     Disarticulation has to be done precisely, the bones oriented as if they’d naturally settled down to the bottom of the fossilized river channel.  He has to double check the number of vertebrae, but finally the bones are laid out in death.  He sighs and, with just a whiff of sulfur, brings the sand grains back into reality, carefully placing them around the fossil before cementing the whole thing in place.  He leaves a few bits of weathered bone poking out of the rock, just enough to catch the eye of a passing grad student. 

     

     He sits down on the sandstone bench, wiping his brow and remembers how proud he’d been of the idea at the time.  Sure, godlessness was on the rise, but the work!  Sometimes he thought that the smug Old Man had known how tortuous it would be when he’d agreed to let him do it.  Same smirk he’d had about all that Job business, back so many years ago.

     

     And with no end in sight!  Who could have guessed how mad they’d go over phylogenetics!  Not just enough to find the things, they had to interpret them too, the bastards.  He ground his teeth in frustration.  Each one they found was a data point that outlined a prediction to be tested by more field work and more fossils.  Then, when they filled in that space and made their little cladograms, they’d make more predictions and look for more fossils!  It was hell!  And he should know!

     

     He nudged the bag at his feet, felt its weight, and knew he had better get moving.  He stood up, scattered a few fragmentary bits of turtle shell in among the mudrock, and started walking towards the next site.